Hard To Hold A Candle In The Cold November Rain
by Kanskje the Titanium Bovine
Summary: When Tony and Pickles get into another fight about the bassist's heroin addiction in November of '92, it spells the beginning of the end for legendary band Snakes N' Barrels. Of course the end of one thing can be the beginning of another...


A/N: Warning: Somewhat depressing. Strong hints of Tony/Pickles. I implore you to ready your tissue box before reading.

* * *

It had started as such a pleasant evening. Snazz and Sammy were out busy doing something, somewhere, and it was just Pickles and Tony in the hotel room they were staying in. Tony had been doing his drugs and, yeah, Pickles had been smoking his pot and sniffing his coke too. But he never went near the heroin, and especially not with the ferocity Tony did. He couldn't stand to see it anymore.

"Why'd ya start doin' that shit in th' ferst place?" he'd asked, lighting a cigarette and trying to sound casual. He got a shrug as a response and shuddered as he had to look away. He couldn't watch Tony stab that needle into himself. Not again. He heard Tony's breath slow as the drug started taking its effect on him, and he scowled. "You're so feckin' stupid," he muttered under his breath.

"Hm?" Tony turned and looked at the singer to his left as he set the needle and tourniquet on the table in front of them. "I'm fuckin' _what_?" Pickles crossed his arms and sank into the couch, silent. This annoyed Tony beyond rationale. "Hey, I'm _talking_ to you, fucker." Pickles turned and glared at the bassist.

"I said ye're feckin' _stupid_, Tony. Ye're a feckin' _idiot_." Tony growled under his breath.

"I don't need to take this from you. You say the same shit every time, _get over it_." He stood up quickly, his legs hitting the table in front of them and knocking over one of the two vodka bottles and a shotglass. Pickles stood up right after him, dropping his half-smoked cigarette into the mostly-full ashtray.

"So, what," he said, his shoulders raised in anger and his hands held in questioning, "ye're jes' gonna walk aff again?"

"Yeah," Tony answered, fixing his tophat over his wavy hair and turning towards the door. "Ya gonna come runnin' after me cryin' like a pussy again?" Pickles' hands balled into fists as he snapped and started yelling.

"Why the feck have you been like dis?" Tony glanced back with him with his pinpoint pupils and his face a mask of red-hot Italian rage.

"Why the fuck do you think?" The words took the breath right out of Pickles, whose shoulders slumped as his expression went from angry to shocked and sad. He got over the feeling quickly, though, and crossed his arms and glared down at the ground Tony was standing on.

"Gad, you've changed since I met you." Tony turned back to look at Pickles, his own hands tightening into fists now.

"Yeah," he growled, "guess what I wasn't doing when you first met me?" Pickles shifted his glare up to Tony's face and, grabbing the empty syringe from the table, took two long steps so he was right in front of him. He held the needle in Tony's face the way one might hold a chewed shoe to a bad puppy.

"Heroin?"

"No," Tony spat out, "I wasn't putting up with whiny bitches like you."

"Gad damn it!" Pickles yelled, throwing the syringe to the ground. "Jest listen ta me!" He tried to catch Tony's gaze with his own, his eyes pleading as hard as his voice, "Listen to yerself!" He reached forward and grabbed Tony's shoulders. That was the last strike for Tony, though.

"Get your fucking hands off of me!" He shouted as his arm instinctively swung, his fist catching Pickles right below his left eye and knocking him backwards onto the table.

"Fecker, that hurt!" Pickles hissed as his hands went up to cover his face, scared that one punch wouldn't be enough to calm Tony down. "You never feckin' hit me before ya started doin' feckin' heroin, yanno!"

"You weren't riding my fucking ass all the time back then either," Tony retorted, turning to leave again. Pickles sat up on the table, now covered in spilt alcohol and cigarette ashes and the light white dusting of cocaine that had covered most of the table. He glanced down at his hand, saw his blood, and the fear melted back into anger.

"Damn it, I'm bleedin'. Thanks!"

"Yeah, you're welcome," Tony shot over his shoulder, "You're welcome for getting you where you fucking are." The irony, overlooked at the time, was of course that the band he'd brought Pickles into was currently crumbling due to his own debilitating drug use.

"I didn't need you, I'd've found anot'er band." He noticed Tony had nearly made it to the door and he sprung up to stop him.

"Yeah, sure ya would've." Pickles grabbed his arm as he reached for the door. He had to admit, the little fucker was persistent. "I said get your fucking hands off of me!" He tugged his arm free and turned, shoving Pickles away from him. The door was around a small corner, and Pickles was subsequently only knocked into a wall.

"Stap pushin' me, damn it!"

"Then let me fucking leave!"

"NO!" Pickles screamed, tears welling up in his eyes. "Nat 'ntil ya feckin' tell me why y've been sech a feckin' asshole!" He inhaled in choppy breaths, trying to keep his eyes dry. "I care abote you so much! Why don't you care abote me?"

"What, what do you want me to say? That I love you? That I'm fucking in love with you?"

"Well Gad feck," Pickles moaned, all the screaming leaving him. "After what we've been through, after all we've shared, what... what we do after jest abote every feckin' show together..." Both of their minds went to the things they'd done together, from the fun to the stupid and the deadly and everything in between. To what they _did_ do after most of their shows, when the other two were already outside signing autographs and mingling with the crowd, sometimes slow but usually fast and frantic, on couches, tables, walls, and floors, moans and screams cut off by deep, passionate kisses. Before they started fighting after every show instead. "Yeah, it'd be nice to feckin' hear it every once in a while!"

The screaming had left Pickles, but it was far from gone from Tony. "Well too fucking bad! I don't!" That was Pickles' breaking point, and he let out a strangled sob as Tony turned back to the door and pulled it open. Pickles had resorted to begging before and it never worked, but that didn't stop him from trying again.

"Please, please close the door, please-..."

"No. I'm gone, I'm out." He glanced back once last time, the Tony that had existed before the heroin, the Tony that _did_ love Pickles, scared, his heart wrenching at his beloved singer's sobs and pleads. But that Tony never won. "Your mascara's running, ya pussy. See ya." He closed the door with probably more force than necessary. Pickles reached forward for the doorknob, but the tears made him miscalculate the distance between him and it, and he stumbled over his own weak legs and fell down in front of it, his hands and forehead pressed up against the wood door.

"Ye'll feckin' die out there!" he yelled as loud as he could, trying to reach Tony through the door even though he knew the bassist was long out of earshot. "...Damn it, Tony... Feckin' Gad damn it..." He sobbed and his nails left small dents in the wood as his hands moved down to clutch his own nauseous stomach. "Please come back... Please..."

He didn't.

Everything started crumbling then. When Snazz and Sammy had gotten back to the hotel, they'd found Pickles sitting on the couch, face still bleeding and bruised, holding and staring at the heroin needle that had somehow survived being thrown to the ground.

"Dude, Pickles, where's Tony?" Sammy thought it was a relatively mundane question, but Pickles had broken down then, curled over and sobbing and holding the syringe so tight it did finally shatter in his hands. Snazz and Sammy had exchanged worried glances before hurrying across the room to wrench the broken glass from Pickles' hands, though it was not an easy ordeal. Surprisingly and luckily none of the glass had cut him, and they were careful about disposing it. Even Sammy, who'd had an increasingly strained relationship with Pickles over the years, sat down next to him and wrapped his arms around him. He really looked like he needed it. Snazz sat down on the other side of him and asked what had happened.

"He jest..." Pickles' voice was weak and hoarse. He didn't feel like talking. "He jest left... w-we were sittin' here an' he j-jest gat really mad... ma-madder'n I've ever seen 'im... an' he jes' l-l-" his sobs drowned out the last word to the sentence. He couldn't say it. He didn't want to think it. He wanted to think he'd passed out and was having a really bad dream. He wanted to so bad. But he couldn't. It had felt too real, on his face, in his heart. Snazz and Sammy stayed up with him most of the night until they could tell he was about to pass out. They lifted him up and, together, walked him to his bed and dropped him in. Before he passed out, he noticed the calendar on the wall – November 17, 1992. It was a date that would be etched into his memory forever.

He woke up early, around 5:30am. The sky was still dark in any case. He lay there staring at the ceiling for a while before he made up his mind. He tossed the sheets off of himself and headed for the door, grabbing a jacket along the way and pulling it on as he stepped out into the chilly November morning. Yeah, real good idea to decide to tour west-to-east as the east coast started to freeze. He shivered, but walked out to the street anyway. He went left out of the hotel, not exactly sure why left or where he was going. But he'd decided he wasn't going to let Tony wander around unfamiliar streets alone. He couldn't. Maybe now he'd be calmer and easier to talk to. He could convince him to come back.

If he could find him, anyway. Who knows where he could be in this city? And sure, Pickles was no human road-map, but Tony couldn't find his way through a hay maze, much less some unfamiliar city. And on drugs like he was, he could be passed out in an alley or in jail or he could be hurt or killed or-

Pickles shook his head to try and clear it of his pessimistic thoughts. He tried thinking to himself that it would be okay, that Tony was okay, and when that didn't help he started whispering it to himself. He shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, looking around, in every alley and every bar he came across. The fog that was settled over the pavement started to thicken as he heard the distant low roar of thunder. He realized that Tony hadn't grabbed a coat before he left. He wasn't even wearing a shirt. Just his vest. He got more frantic. He started mentally screaming at himself for not having followed when he'd had the chance, for just collapsing there like the fucking pussy Tony said he was.

He wished there were more people around. The city wouldn't wake for another hour or so. If there were people at least he could've run up and asked them if they'd seen a guy in a vest and a tophat. But there weren't, and he couldn't, and he might not have even if there _were_ people, on the off-chance they'd say, "Yeah, I think a guy like that was taken to the hospital last night," or something along those lines.

He realized he didn't know what he'd do or say if he _did_ find Tony. What could he say? If he found him, he realized, the first thing he'd probably do was break down crying again. And what would Tony do? Shove him away and just get more lost, most likely. He wished he'd brought Snazz or Sammy. They could've helped, they would've known what to say. Tony might've listened to them. At the very least they might've been able to talk him into coming back and finishing the tour.

He pressed on. He wasn't going to stop looking until he found him, he knew that much, no matter how improbable it may have been to find a single man in an entire city. He was so scared something had happened to him. He considered checking out the local hospitals, but he decided he wouldn't be able to handle that. When the rain started he had to use all his willpower to not break out in a sprint screaming Tony's name. He tried to convince himself it would be fine – Tony had left like this before, and he'd always come back by morning. So why was Pickles out searching for him at 6am, hours before Tony had returned in the past? It had been there in that last glance over the shoulder before the door shut. He knew he wouldn't come back unless he absolutely had to. He hoped he was enough to warrant needing to come back.

He'd searched for hours with no luck. He didn't know what he'd been thinking trying to find him in the first place. He'd been able to hold himself together for the most part, until he found the hat. He stared at it for a long time, trying to convince himself it was just some other random tophat with a green band because who knows how many of those there are? Maybe some fine old gent was perusing the alleyways and a gust of wind knocked his hat off. Pickles was always terrible with convincing himself of things. He knelt down and picked the hat up, shaking the rain water from it even as more rain pattered down against it. He'd pressed his back up against one of the buildings, curled up with the hat held to his chest, and cried.

Pickles got back to the hotel around 10:00. When he opened the door, he was immediately met to Snazz yelling at him. "Where the hell have you been? We've been worried to fucking death!" Pickles looked at him apologetically through the wet hair covering his face. He held the hat out to them.

"I couldn't find him..." Sammy took the hat from Pickles who grudgingly let it go.

"Fuck, man, he always wears his hat."

"I know," Pickles said, a quiet sob escaping his chest. Snazz wrapped an arm around Pickles' shoulders and led him over to the couch, sitting down next to him. Sammy sat down across from them in the chair, setting Tony's tophat on the now-cleaned table. "He's usually back by now," Pickles mumbled, staring down at his hands. Snazz rubbed his back comfortingly.

"He'll be back, Pickles, he always comes back." Pickles made no response.

"Look," Sammy said, leaning forward, "when we get home we'll force him into a rehab center or something. Maybe we'll cut the tour short." Pickles didn't respond to that either, and the drummer sighed.

"Do you need anything, Pickles?" Snazz asked quietly. "Some water? A towel?" Pickles glanced at him. He needed to get his thoughts in order, to make them concrete.

"C'n ya bring me sem paper an' a pen?"Snazz nodded and stood up, grabbing a notebook and pen from a table near the door and returning with them. Pickles took them with shaky hands and, after a short pause, started scribbling down his thoughts in his big, crooked, uneven handwriting. Snazz and Sammy watched him write frantically for a short while before Sammy spoke up.

"Writin' a song, eh?" Pickles shrugged. "Classic lyrical artist, just waitin' to turn a bad experience into a financial gain." Pickles stopped writing and glared up at Sammy.

"Feck. You." Sammy opened his mouth to reply, but Snazz shot him a look that demanded he shut it right back up because if he said a word, he'd knock him the fuck out. Pickles went back to writing, and a thick, tense silence fell over them.

He stopped writing again when he heard the doorknob turn. In fact, he stop breathing, too. Snazz looked over at the door and glared daggers at Tony when he stepped in. "Where the fuck have you been?" he asked, his voice poisonous with anger.

"Got lost..." he replied quietly, looking across the room at Pickles. Snazz stood up and walked over to Tony, pissed beyond belief. He snapped his fingers to get Tony's attention, and the moment the bassist turned his attention to him, his fist connected squarely with Tony's mouth. He stumbled back and covered his mouth with his hand, but didn't swing back. "Okay... I deserved that."

"Hell yeah ya did!" Snazz yelled. "Here, want another?" Tony raised his arms in front of his face to block any more swings, but no more came. "He was never like this before," Snazz growled, motioning to Pickles. "We're cutting the tour short. We're going home fucking _today_, and we're dumping your sorry ass in a rehab. You'll be lucky if we still want you in the band when you get out."

When Tony had gotten out of rehab, they'd let him back into the band. But things weren't right. They weren't the same. Things were always tense. Pickles refused to be around him. Not because he didn't want to be – because he absolutely _needed_ to be around him, and he couldn't go back down that path. He knew most people relapse within a year, and he couldn't watch Tony do that. No, he had to distance himself. The fact is, though, that when you distance yourself from your bandmates but continue writing things yourself, problems start to arise. You need the collaboration of the band as a whole to write the best songs, after all. Of course that didn't happen, and most of what they'd written got thrown out. Eventually things just got too strained. It was too difficult. Nearly four years after they'd stuck Tony in rehab, he quit the band entirely. Within the next year, both Snazz and Sammy ended up leaving as well.

Snakes N' Barrels had broken up. It was all over the news for the first few weeks, then in a few places for a few months after the event happened in the mid 90's. They had attempted to scrape things together for a few years after it, but the incident left them all out in the rain. Tony, Sammy, and Snazz had all but fallen off the face of the Earth after that. With the break up of that band went all the fun from Pickles' youth; it seemed a metaphor to him as he neared age thirty, like the crumbling band was a sign of his crumbling youth. He looked forward to the turn of the century, to the turn of the millennium, with unease and dysphoria. The stress racked him over as his money started to run out, and, with his money, went his hair. In these days he was so sure, so absolutely sure that his father had been right all along and he hated him for it, and hated himself for it. He'd tried calling him once and only once, when he was almost drained of money, and the conversation had ended in screaming and tears. His drug and alcohol abuse began getting worse, and he was introduced to just why Tony had started doing heroin – the escape from reality felt good. He was looking forward to the day a newspaper headlined with _SNAKES N' BARRELS FRONTMAN PICKLES FOUND DEAD FROM OVERDOSE OUTSIDE OF BAR IN LOS ANGELES_. He was keen on seeing this idea through when he walked into a bar in late '97, ordered the strongest drink the bar would make, and set to the task of drinking as many as he could before his organs all entirely shut down. He didn't acknowledge the suited man that sat next to him until he began to speak.

"So I hear you're not doing very well for yourself, Pickles." the man said. Pickles ignored the man at first. "Careful, if you drink that too fast you'll kill yourself." Pickles looked sidelong at the odd man.

"What's with th' monkey suit, champ?" he asked, knocking back the drink in one spiteful gulp.

"Uh-huh... well, I find it's always good to look your best when making a business proposition, no matter how... worse for wear the client is." Pickles raised an eyebrow then looked down at himself – ripped T-shirt, ripped jeans, ratty sneakers, a light dusting of dirt, cocain, and ashes rubbed into the cloth.

"So dat would make me th' client?" he asked, motioning for the bartender to pour him another drink.

"Indeed it would," the man answered, grabbing the toxic drink away when the bartender set it down. "I'm not keen on letting my clients kill themselves before the proposition has been dealt with."

"Yeah, an' what're you, some kainda lawyer-man?"

"Uhh, no. I am what they call a Chief Financial Officer-"

"Ye're an accountant?" Pickles asked, following with a "Pfff" for good measure. "Why do I need you den? I ain't gat any money." The suited man leaned forward.

"No, of course not. Not since your band crumbled. But would you like to?"

"Have money?" Pickles asked with a chuckle. "'Course I would, who wouldn't?"

"A dead man wouldn't," the CFO answered matter-of-factly. Pickles glared at him.

"Ye're fenny. I think I'm gonna call you Fenny-Man frem now an." The CFO cleared his throat.

"What would you say if I told you I could get you back out there. Back out in the spotlight, surrounded by money and women who love you for your money?"

"I'd say, 'what, do ya have a time-machine er semthin?'"

"No, Pickles, no I do not. I do have an open spot, though. While you were in Snakes N' Barrels, did you ever learn anything from Twinskins? Anything drum-related?" Pickles shrugged.

"Yeah, I guess. I mean I played drems before too. Why?"

"Well, having someone already famous from another band in your own band would quickly jump you up the ladder, wouldn't you say?"

"If ya need a dremmer why don't ya jest go find Sammy?"

"He lacks what we need." Pickles scoffed.

"Oh yeah, an' whattaya need? Drenk old has-been loosin' 'is hair, all coked up an' burned-out playin' an instrement he can't even play?" He grabbed at his drink. "Gimme back my poison."

"No," the CFO said, holding it out of Pickles' reach. "And no. Twinskins lacks... the mentality that we need. He lacks the brutality that we need." Pickles slouched on his barstool, his arms crossed over his chest.

"Oh yeah? An' jest who are 'we'?"

"We're called Dethklok." Pickles sulked for a moment before actually giving it some thought.

"Ya think you c'n get big?" he asked. The CFO nodded. "...Alright. I ain't gat nethin' ta lose. Feck it, sure. Yeah. I'll do it." The CFO held out his hand and Pickles shook it. "C'n I have my drink back now?"


End file.
